Flows, Klaviyo

Card class: Non-Hero • Category: Email Marketing

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At a glance

The operational inventory of every Klaviyo automation in the merchant’s account, with status, trigger type, and last-updated metadata. The single most important diagnostic for “is my email programme actually doing what I think it’s doing”, flows generate 60-75 percent of email revenue for ecommerce brands but routinely sit in unexpected states (paused mid-development, error on a step, accidentally archived) without anyone noticing for weeks.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Klaviyo data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK supplements brand on Shopify with 96,000 active Klaviyo subscribers. Card snapshot at 09:30 UTC on Friday 17 May 26. What the table is telling us:

1. Browse Abandonment is in draft state since 30 April. This is the single most important finding. The flow was edited 17 days ago and never re-activated. The brand is currently capturing zero revenue from product-browsing recipients who don’t add to cart, even though the flow is fully built. Brand-typical impact at this scale: GBP 2,800-5,400 per month in deferred revenue while the flow sits in draft. Recommended action: investigate what changed on 30 April, validate the flow is still configured correctly, switch to live.
2. Birthday Promotion is in manual state. A manual-status flow requires the merchant to push each recipient through individually rather than automating the send. For a Birthday flow this is almost certainly an oversight; manual was the original state during build, and the merchant forgot to change it to live. Birthday flows typically deliver £15-£40 revenue per recipient at activation; with ~260 birthdays per month on a 96K list, that’s GBP 3,900-10,400 per month being missed. Fix: change status to live; verify the audience-filter still scopes to birthdays in the next 24-48 hours.
3. Welcome Series was last edited on 04 April. This is fine; recent edits to live flows are normal as the merchant tunes content. Worth noting only that welcome series performance is the highest-revenue flow for most brands, so any edits should be A/B tested rather than pushed wholesale.
4. Post-Refund Goodwill is brand new (28 April). A new flow with creation and last-updated identical means it was created and immediately activated. For a refund-related flow, validate that the trigger is firing only on legitimate refunds (not on partial refunds or on order edits that look like refunds in the data) before assuming it’s working as intended.
5. Subscription Renewal Reminder updated 11 May. Recent update plus live status; check whether the update was content (fine, no action needed) or trigger logic (audit recipient flow for the next 7 days to confirm correct triggering).
6. Brand is running 8 flows; industry benchmark for a 96K-list ecommerce brand is 8-14 flows. The brand has appropriate flow coverage; the gap to 14 typically fills with: lead-magnet flow, second-touch welcome (90-day post-signup re-engagement), product-replenishment for consumables, customer-anniversary, and post-review-request follow-up. Adding one or two of these to address the brand’s specific repeat-purchase pattern usually delivers 8-15 percent uplift in flow-attributed revenue without requiring acquisition spend.

The diagnostic flow when this card is reviewed:

1. Scan for unexpected drafts. Any flow in draft state for a known revenue function (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) is the highest-leverage finding on this card. Investigate immediately.
2. Scan for orphan manuals. Flows in manual state that should be automated indicate forgotten activation steps. Convert to live unless the merchant has a specific reason for manual approval.
3. Cross-reference with Flow Revenue Mix. Flows that are live but generating zero revenue are either (a) not firing because the trigger event isn’t capturing, (b) firing but to an empty audience because the audience filter has drifted, or (c) firing but the content is so weak that recipients don’t engage. The flow-revenue-mix card distinguishes these patterns.
4. Cross-reference with Flow Step Drop-off. Flows with high creation-date age and no recent updates may have step-by-step drop-off patterns that have evolved over time and now look unhealthy compared to when they were built.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

• Flow Status Breakdown rolls up the count of flows by status (live / draft / manual) for at-a-glance health rather than the per-flow detail this card provides.
• Flow Trigger Types distributes the merchant’s flows by trigger event (welcomed, purchased, viewed_product, etc.) to surface coverage gaps on common ecommerce trigger patterns.
• Flow Count Summary is the high-level “how many flows do I run” composite for executive reporting.
• Flow Revenue Mix is the revenue-side counterpart: of the merchant’s flows, which are generating revenue and which are running but not contributing.
• Flow Step Drop-off decomposes per-flow performance to surface where in multi-step sequences subscribers fall out.
• Abandoned Cart Flow Status is the highest-revenue-impact flow for ecommerce specifically; brands with abandoned-cart-flow in draft state are leaving revenue on the table at a rate this card surfaces faster than the dedicated abandoned-cart card.
• Alert Flow Error Rate fires alerts when a flow’s error rate exceeds threshold, complementing the static state-inventory view this card provides.
• Revenue per Recipient for the headline impact of running flows correctly versus letting them sit in draft.

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Klaviyo’s own dashboard:

• Flows → All Flows is the direct equivalent. Klaviyo presents the same list of flows with status, trigger, and last-updated; the Vortex IQ card is essentially the same data with cross-source diagnostic context layered on top.
• Flows → individual flow → Settings for the per-flow audience filter, send-time window, and trigger-condition configuration that determines whether a live flow is actually firing.
• Audiences → Lists & Segments to verify that the audience referenced by a flow still has the expected recipient population. Flows can stay live but fire on zero recipients if the underlying audience filter has drifted.

Why the Vortex IQ list may legitimately differ from Klaviyo’s:

1. Pagination boundary. Klaviyo returns up to 50 flows per page; brands with more than 50 flows see paginated results. Vortex IQ aggregates across all pages and surfaces the full count, so brands with 51+ flows will see Vortex IQ’s list as longer than Klaviyo’s default Flows view.
2. Refresh timing. Klaviyo’s UI updates flow status in real-time as the merchant clicks; Vortex IQ refreshes the list view every 30 seconds via webhook ingestion, so very recent state changes (within the last 30 seconds) may not yet appear.
3. Archived flows. Klaviyo’s Flows view defaults to non-archived flows; Vortex IQ surfaces all flows including archived ones unless filtered. Brands that have archived legacy flows over the years see a longer Vortex IQ list than Klaviyo default.

Cross-connector reconciliation:

• Klaviyo klv_flows_list vs Mailchimp, Brevo, Drip, ActiveCampaign equivalents: definitional twins on different platforms. Brands transitioning from one ESP to another benefit from the side-by-side flow inventory to verify nothing has been lost in migration.
• Klaviyo flow-revenue contribution vs Shopify/BigCommerce order-index revenue: real reconciliation. The flows-list card identifies which flows exist; the revenue-attribution view confirms each flow is genuinely contributing to the merchant’s order revenue.
• Klaviyo flow trigger-event firing rate vs the source-event stream (e.g. abandoned_cart from Shopify or BigCommerce): useful operational reconciliation. A live flow with an abandoned_cart trigger should fire roughly proportionally to the merchant’s actual cart-abandonment rate; large gaps indicate the trigger event isn’t being captured correctly.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My welcome flow shows as “live” but new subscribers aren’t receiving it. What’s going on? Three common causes. (1) The trigger event isn’t being captured: if the flow triggers on a custom event like signed_up_via_homepage_form, the form integration may have broken without the merchant noticing. Verify the event is firing on the [Klaviyo metrics view] for the trigger name. (2) The audience filter excludes the new subscribers: filters that say “subscribed to list X” require the subscriber to actually be on list X at trigger time, which fails if the form adds them to a different list. (3) The flow is gated by a time-delay step that hasn’t elapsed yet: subscribers may be in the flow but haven’t reached the first send step yet. How do I tell if a flow is firing on the right people? Two checks. First, the Flow Revenue Mix card shows whether the flow is generating revenue, which is the strongest single signal that the right audience is reaching the right send. Second, Klaviyo’s flow analytics → Recipients tab shows the actual identified recipients who entered the flow in the last X days; spot-check a sample to verify they match the merchant’s intent. My team archived old flows but they still appear in Vortex IQ. Why? Vortex IQ surfaces the complete flow inventory by default, including archived flows. Archived flows do not send and do not contribute revenue, but they appear in the list as historical reference. Brands wanting a current-active-only view can filter the card to status live plus status manual and exclude draft and archived states. A draft flow has been edited recently but never activated. Should I activate it? Not without review. A draft flow with recent edits is one of two things: (a) actively-being-built work that the team intends to finish before activating, or (b) abandoned work that was never followed through. The diagnostic question is “do you remember why this is in draft?”. If yes, leave it; if no, audit the configuration and either delete or activate. Avoid activating a flow without understanding what it does, flows fire on triggers and produce sends, and unintended sends to the wrong audience can damage sender reputation faster than they generate value. Klaviyo lets me set a flow to A/B test mode. Does Vortex IQ track A/B test outcomes? Yes, via the A/B Test Winners card. The flows-list card surfaces flow existence and status; the A/B-test-winners card surfaces test outcomes once tests reach statistical significance. Pair the two when reviewing flow performance. Why do I have so many flows in manual state? manual is Klaviyo’s default during flow building before the merchant explicitly switches to live. Brands frequently leave flows in manual indefinitely, either because the original builder didn’t know to switch states or because the team wants manual approval for each recipient. The latter is rare for ecommerce flows; the former is the dominant pattern. Audit each manual flow to determine whether it should be live or draft. My team operates 30+ flows. Is that too many? Not necessarily. Mature ecommerce brands with multiple product lines, customer segments, and lifecycle stages routinely operate 20-40 active flows. The question isn’t quantity but coverage and quality: is each flow targeting a meaningful customer cohort with relevant content? The Flow Revenue Mix card surfaces flows generating disproportionate revenue (worth investing more in) and flows generating zero (candidates for archive or rebuild). Can Vortex IQ trigger flow activation from the dashboard? No, read-only by design. The card surfaces what state each flow is in; the merchant’s marketing team executes state changes inside Klaviyo.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Flows is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Klaviyo and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.